US Representative Joseph Kennedy III is hoping to jumpstart discussions on a new economic strategy for southeastern Massachusetts — one that ignores the fact there is technically a border between this state and Rhode Island. That vision is based on leveraging assets that are nearby, whether those assets are in New Bedford, Taunton, Fall River, Attleboro, or in Providence and Warwick, Rhode Island.

“Treat Fall River, New Bedford, Taunton, Attleboro, Providence, Tiverton not as isolated silos, but as a combined economic force,” Kennedy said to members of the SouthCoast Development Partnership Friday morning in the Moot Courtroom at the University of Massachusetts School of Law.

“Traditional economic development strategies tend to ignore an obvious reality — the sense of community that is rarely shaped by city, state or district lines. Sure some of you, might live in Providence and do business in Fall River. Or you’re raising a family in Tiverton but teach in Dartmouth,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy began his address by saying that he hears three concerns primarily: that businesses can’t find enough qualified workers, energy costs need to be reined in, and the Massachusetts’ innovation-based economy “is leaving far too many people behind.”

--Consumer complaint against Comcast closed despite demand for $535,000 to establish Internet service

Earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission deemed Internet service a common carrier utility under Title II of the Communications Act and thus subject to the law’s universal service and non-discrimination obligations. New FCC rules implementing the policy became final on June 12, 2015 and withstood judicial petitions by large telephone and cable companies and their trade associations to block them from taking effect.

Going forward, it remains to be seen whether the FCC will enforce Title II universal service and anti-redlining requirements against the large, dominant telephone and cable companies that provide much of the nation’s premise landline Internet service in tightly proscribed “footprints” within their service areas. Early indications are that the FCC is opting to not enforce these requirements even though it specifically declined to forbear their enforcement in its March 12, 2015 Open Internet Order and Rulemaking, finding that doing so would not be in the public interest. Harold Feld of Public Knowledge termed universal service “the quintessential common-carrier obligation.”

One of the key lines of pure unadulterated bullshit spread by the USTR concerning the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is that it won't lead to significant changes in US law. That's just wrong.

As KEI points out, it's pretty clear that the current text would completely undermine key Supreme Court rulings concerning state sovereign immunity from intellectual property disputes. Zack Struver and Tazio De Tomassi created a short video explaining why:

Collective bargaining agreements between Verizon and 39,000 members of CWA and IBEW expire at midnight tonight. CWA has put a constructive, comprehensive new bargaining proposal across the table at negotiations in Rye, NY that would offer the company significant healthcare and retiree cost savings.and union bargainers are currently waiting for a response from Verizon.

Seeking to join the Gigabit Parade, cable operators are apparently chomping at the bit to deploy the emerging next-gen DOCSIS 3.1 spec so they can offer 1 Gig and higher speeds themselves.

In its latest survey of cable providers across the globe released earlier this week, IHS Inc. found that, on average, providers expect to pass about a third of their residential broadband subscribers with DOCSIS 3.1-enabled headends by April 2017. In the US alone, that would translate to more than 17 million cable modem homes passed by D3.1, which is designed to support data downstream speeds as high as 10 Gbit/s and upstream speeds of 1 Gbit/s or more.

If this brisk rollout pace is realized, DOCSIS 3.1 would be far more widely deployed in the early going than its predecessor, DOCSIS 3.0, as well as earlier versions of the cable broadband spec. In fact, many cable systems have still not been upgraded for DOCSIS 3.0, more than nine years after CableLabs completed the spec and more than seven years after the first MSO deployments of D3.0 began.

AT&T's $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV is a done deal, as the Federal Communications Commission today announced that it has voted to approve the merger. After the vote, AT&T announced that it has completed the acquisition.

The FCC imposed conditions on the acquisition, saying they ensure the combination will be in the public interest. AT&T will become the largest pay-TV company in the nation with about 26 million subscribers, jumping ahead of Comcast.

With all the revelations that have come out about the NSA and our foreign and domestic spy programs, it can, at times, become difficult to parse out exactly what we're supposed to be getting pissed off about and what is the exact kind of spy-work we ought to expect the alphabet agencies to conduct.

Some of the groups that are involved in getting these revelations out there don't make it much easier, of course. Take as an example the latest Wikileaks info-dump, which chiefly concerns the NSA's spy program against our ally Japan. From the press release accompanying the documents:

You are looking at a map of all the permissions you have given six popular smartphone apps -- Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram, Skype and Viber. Instagram can use your camera and microphone to record audio and take pictures and video, without asking you first. Gmail can read and modify your phone contacts. Viber has your precise GPS location at all times. Facebook can read all your text messages.

Click headline to read more and access hot link to view the Hi-Res version of the infographic--

FireChat connects all nearby phones into a network and uses this network to pass messages. Today, we are launching private off-the-grid messaging. FireChat uses unlicensed spectrum to create a heterogenous ad hoc network for messaging. Connections using unlicensed spectrum are fairly short-range: about 40 yards in most situations, but up to 70 if the conditions are right. While the throughput of these connections differs depending on technology — Wi-Fi Direct is considerably faster than Bluetooth Low Energy — the range is pretty similar.

The key to the way the network operates is the ability to daisy-chain devices to pass messages much further. FireChat augments pure off-the-grid transmission with using the Internet when available, but for now let’s focus on off-the-grid operation only.

A potentially big ruling came out of the courtroom of Judge Lucy Koh yesterday, in which she affirmed a magistrate judge's decision to tell the government to get a warrant if it wants to obtain historical location info about certain "target" mobile phones (officially known as "Cell Site Location Info" -- or CSLI).

The government sought to use a provision of the Stored Communications Act (a part of ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) to demand this info without a warrant -- using a much lower standard: "specific and articulable facts" rather than the all important "probable cause."

Zayo Group Holdings Inc. said Friday that it has "assumed network oversight and support responsibility" for Eagle-Net Alliance, the state's intergovernmental high-speed Internet network that was launched with $100.6 million in federal stimulus funding and which has been met with years of controversy.

"Zayo and Eagle-Net have entered into this interim agreement as they work to establish an expanded, long-term partnership," Boulder-based Zayo, a global fiber-network operator, said in an announcement.

Broomfield-based Eagle-Net was founded to provide broadband service to schools, libraries and other "community anchor institutions" in areas of the state that lack high-speed connections.

The cybersecurity industry and the government have been struggling over proposed export rules that researchers say could end up making the Internet less safe. And now the government says it will try again and give the public another chance to weigh in.

Earlier this year, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security released a proposal for how to implement restrictions on exporting so-called "intrusion software" in order to comply with an international arms control agreement known as the Wassenaar Arrangement. The list of items covered by the agreement was updated in December of 2013 to include some surveillance and intelligence-gathering tools and the proposed rules were meant to ensure the U.S. meets its obligations under the pact.

But the proposal drew criticism from big tech companies and independent researchers alike, who argued that they were too broad and would end up stymieing defensive cybersecurity research. Security professionals warned that licensing requirements in the proposed regulations could limit the use of so-called "penetration testing" -- tools designed to help researchers discover problems in computers systems or even make it more difficult for researchers to disclose vulnerabilities they uncover to software makers so they can be fixed.

If you’re still waiting for your reservation to come up as Microsoft rolls out Windows 10, we can’t blame you for being eager to get your virtual hands on Microsoft’s latest OS. But if you get an email encouraging you to upgrade to Windows 10, you’ll want to exercise a little caution, lest you get taken by scammers.

A post published to Cisco Systems’s company blog outlines how scammers are taking advantage of Windows 10’s launch to push ransomware onto unsuspecting PC users. At first glance, the emails look reasonably legit: Cisco notes that scammers are spoofing the sender’s email address to make it look as if the message is from Microsoft. Also, the blue-and-white color scheme used in the message nearly matches the colors Microsoft is using for Windows 10 marketing materials. So unless you look carefully, you could get fooled into thinking the email is actually from Microsoft.

An attached .zip file purports to be a Windows 10 installer, but according to Cisco, the attachment contains a piece of ransomware called CTB-Locker that encrypts your files and requests payment within 96 hours, lets your files be encrypted forever.

Negotiations wrap up Friday in the latest round of the five-year-old Trans-Pacific Partner negotiations, with final sticking points remaining over sugar, dairy, state-owned enterprises and the exclusivity period granted to the makers of certain types of drugs.

Ministers from the U.S., Japan, Canada and nine other countries are negotiating in private at a resort on the Hawaiian island of Maui to hash out the agreement’s final details.

“As anyone who has been in trade negotiations knows, those final decisions are always the most difficult,” Michael Froman, the U.S. Trade Representative, said earlier this week.

Outside the negotiation rooms, official advisers, congressional staff, trade groups, lobbyists and nonprofit advocates roam the resorts’ lobby, using every spare plug to charge phone and laptops, meeting among themselves and hoping to catch a moment with the delegates, either through official briefings or unguarded moments in the elevator or hotel restaurants.

Click headline to read more and access hot links to listen to this Marketplace radio segment--

Leaders of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers announced that 39,000 Verizon workers up and down the East Coast will work without a contract when their collective bargaining agreement expires at midnight tonight, and continue their fight for a fair agreement while on the job.

The union leaders also announced that they will leave the sites of round-the-clock bargaining in Philadelphia and Rye, NY, where union and management teams have been meeting since June 22nd in what has so far been a vain attempt to reach a contract. The unions have informed the company, however, that they are prepared to schedule regular bargaining sessions, and urged the company to begin bargaining constructively.

Google Fiber's network build in Raleigh is underway. The company will be deploying 5,700 miles of fiber, connected to roughly 50,000 telephone poles, all tied to 26 fiber huts scattered around the city. Nine locations for fiber huts have just been picked out by Google, each one 28 feet long and 9 feet tall and acting as the backbone for the looming network. There's still no word on when the network will go live, however.

“We will open signups first in areas where the network is ready, permits are in place and we have crews to connect our fiber directly to homes," Google tells Raleigh locals.

Fed up with waiting for faster Internet access, two Northern Virginia governments are trying to prompt the development of fiber-optic broadband networks by creating them or partnering with entities that can.

Alexandria is seeking proposals from organizations that want to work with the city to create a fiber-optic backbone network that can be used by public institutions — such as libraries, school and public safety agencies — and by businesses, residents and nonprofit groups.

Five months ago, Arlington County decided to offer access to its own 10-mile fiber-optic network to companies located in the county’s major commercial areas as an economic development incentive.

“Broadband is the new transit. It’s sort of a must-have for any business,” said Stephanie Landrum, president and chief executive of the Alexandria Economic Partnership. “Seven years ago, only people working in technology or the federal government needed access to the highest speeds and capacity for broadband connectivity. Now it’s becoming an expectation that business people and those working in the nonprofit sector have it too.”

Although Verizon Fios offers a high-speed fiber-optic network in much of the Washington region, it is not available everywhere. And although cable firms such as RCN and Comcast offer what they call high-speed Internet access, experts say fiber-optic service is 200 times faster than the typical household cable service.

Drivers in the City of Columbia can get ready to pull out their phones to park! With Passport’s mobile payment system, available in early August, residents and visitors can use mobile parking payment technology in all of the City’s 5,000 parking spaces. The app, developed by Charlotte, NC-based Passport, is free to download and gives users a much simpler option than paying at the parking meter.

“This installation of Passport is a large component of the City’s initiatives to revamp our parking program,” said John Spade, Parking Director for the City of Columbia. “We know that parkers in Columbia will embrace this upgrade in technology, and it will make the process of parking one less thing to stress about.”

After thoroughly researching various mobile payment providers through a competitive bidding process, the City selected Passport, the industry leader in mobile payments for parking and transit to provide this service. Passport has successfully launched its mobile payment platform in cities like Chicago, Boston, Tucson, and even nearby in Charleston, SC.

Windows 10 is amazing. Windows 10 is fantastic. Windows 10 is glorious. Windows 10 is faster, smoother and more user-friendly than any Windows operating system that has come before it. Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been, addressing nearly all of the major problems users had with Microsoft’s previous-generation platform in one fell swoop.

But there’s something you should know: As you read this article from your newly upgraded PC, Windows 10 is also spying on nearly everything you do.

Some 38,000 Verizon union workers from Massachusetts to Virginia are threatening to strike at midnight as the countdown looms for their contract to expire.

Both sides reported little or no progress yesterday in talks that started June 22.

The workers in nine states — including 5,000 in Massachusetts — whose contract expires at 11:59 p.m. are service reps, clerical workers, operators, testers and technicians “that build and maintain Verizon’s entire network infrastructure,” said Paul Feeney, spokesman for Boston’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2222. “It is inconceivable that Verizon would have a qualified and well-trained workforce capable of making those repairs in a timely manner should there be a work stoppage.”

Verizon, meanwhile, said it has been training “thousands of non-union Verizon employees and outside business partners” in network and customer service functions. “In the event of a work stoppage, Verizon is confident it can continue to maintain its network and systems and serve our customers,” spokesman Phil Santoro said.

The Obama administration must be doing a little housecleaning in preparation for the 2016 winner. After months of highly-sporadic and belated responses to We The People petitions, it's answered two big ones (that have been sitting around forever) in a single day. It's also issued a handful of other responses to open petitions, some of which are little more than "we decline to respond," accompanied by a link to the site's Terms of Participation.

It took on two big petitions today. The first was a response to a request to pardon Snowden, which it denied under its "No Good Whistleblowing Goes Unpunished" policy. The second asked for a long-delayed rewrite of an outdated law.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act has been in need of reform for years. If nothing else, the law's misleading name needs to be changed. One of the more notorious aspects of the law is that it gives email less privacy protection than snail mail, which is already an exceedingly low bar.

The administration agrees that reform of this law -- which treats email older than six months as "abandoned" and thus easily-accessible by law enforcement -- is needed. However, it does so both belatedly, vaguely and disingenuously.

The We The People petition calling for ECPA reform was posted November, 12, 2013. It passed the 100,000-signature threshold roughly 30 days later. At that point, a response was "required." 593 days later, that response has finally arrived.

The Law of Accelerating Returns | POTs and PANs: The FCC recently set the new definition of broadband at 25 Mbps. When I look around at the demand in the world today at how households use broadband services, this feels about right. But at the same time, the FCC has agreed to pour billions of dollars through the Connect America Fund to assist the largest telcos in upgrading their rural DSL to 15 Mbps.

Not only is that speed not even as fast as today’s definition of broadband, but the telcos have up to seven years to deploy the upgraded technology, during which time the broadband needs of the customers this is intended for will have increased to four times higher than today’s needs.

And likely, once the subsidy stops the telcos will say that they are finished upgrading and this will probably be the last broadband upgrade in those areas for another twenty years, at which point the average household’s broadband needs will be 32 times higher than today.

I laud Google and a few others for pushing the idea of gigabit networks. This concept says that we should leap over the exponential curve and build a network today that is already future-proofed. I see networks all over the country that have the capacity to provide much faster speeds than are being sold to customers. I still see cable company networks with tons of customers still sitting at 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps as the basic download speed and fiber networks with customers being sold 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps products. And I have to ask: why?

Some excerpts (above) from an excellent blog post from Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting that explains to a great extent why the United States suffers from inadequate telecom infrastructure: employing an ill suited linear planning and business model for today's Internet-based telecommunications space that is expanding exponentially.

I too have asked why -- why providers and regulators view Internet-based telecom like a consumptive utility such as electric power, water or natural gas and base their business models on packaging and selling bandwidth rather than telecommunications services?

For example, see this provider's "dedicated optical fiber" service that slices and dices bandwidth into seven (yes, seven) bandwidth tiers at exorbitant prices on a fiber circuit that can easily deliver 1 Gigabit of bandwidth.

Earlier this week, we wrote about fairly damning new evidence that almost certainly shows that the song "Happy Birthday" is in the public domain, and not, as Warner Music's Warner/Chappell claims, still covered by a copyright that it holds (and ruthlessly enforces). The evidence was in the form of a 1922 songbook that published the music and lyrics to Happy Birthday, noting that it was via "special permission through courtesy of the Clayton F Summy Co."

The Summy company is who registered the copyright in 1935, and which Warner eventually bought. Warner has long argued that there was no pre-1935 publication. As the lawyers for the plaintiffs ("Good Morning To You Productions" -- who are making a documentary film about the song) pointed out, the publishing of the song and lyrics in 1922 without a copyright notice pretty clearly establishes the song is in the public domain. Even if there were a copyright on the original songbook, it would have expired.

It seemed pretty damning, but Warner/Chappell has quickly responded by basically trying to muddy the waters with a "well, who really knows what 'special permission' really meant" line, along with lots of other FUD about how Summy wouldn't have even owned the copyright at that point in the first place. Basically, Warner is just going to claim that none of this matters for as long as it possibly can. Watch the tap dancing:

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